#Gamera 2000

[playstationpark]

Neo Hong Kong 'Gamera 2000' PlayStation Support us on Patreon

[obscurevideogames]

cleared -

Gamera 2000 (Digital Frontier - PSX - 1997)

[badschmitt24071994]

Gamera 2000 Boss Battle

[segadriven]

New video! We take a look at the brazen PS1 Panzer Dragoon clone, Gamera 2000!

[timmurleyart]

Death by Gigan. 🔴🦖⚡️

[murasakinocatt]

[ask-red-and-solomon]

A bunch of... doodles!

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Weeks in Review (September 10-30, 2023)

I adore Godzilla Final Wars, but it's a movie with an identity crisis, unsure whether it wants to be headlining a Toho Champion Festival or mesmerizing American teenagers at a mid-aughts multiplex. @spacehunter-m's Final Wars 2004: The Year We Make Corn-Tack gives it a strong tug in the first direction, whittling the runtime down to 77 minutes and replacing most of the music and sound effects. She was inspired by Space Warriors 2000, of all things; as she put it, both films are "largely comprised of nonstop, monotonous action." As in that bizarro Ultraman compilation film, the kaiju trash-talk each other. It makes you wonder why Ryuhei Kitamura didn't at least bring back the speech bubbles from Godzilla vs. Gigan. Kaiju fan edits are rare, and this is in a class all by itself. Download it here.

Shigeru Kayama's novelizations of Godzilla (1954) and Godzilla Raids Again are out—hopefully the first of many to come. My copy only arrived on Saturday, so I haven't had the chance to read the whole thing yet, but I've made it through Godzilla. It's interesting to see Kayama, who wrote the initial treatment, take another swing at the story after the film was finished. He puts back moments like Godzilla eating a cow and attacking a lighthouse, and is also more overt with the wartime allusions. There's an incredible moment where Dr. Yamane muses that studying Godzilla and learning his secrets could be Japan's way of redeeming itself after "caus[ing] a great deal of trouble to people throughout the world." Note that these are novella-length, so much less in-depth than the novelizations of American Godzilla films you might be used to (Godzilla Raids Again is less than 80 pages). The book ends with an afterword by translator Jeffrey Angles contextualizing the tales.

Godzilla: War for Humanity continues to be a standout IDW miniseries. There's a new and very weird monster in the second issue, plus a no-nonsense Mothra (she tries to recruit Godzilla to fight Zoospora by shooting him in the back of the head and dragging him into the ocean in front of Minilla).

I've also got to mention the solicitation for another Godzilla Rivals installment, due December 20. Nola Pfau is writing, Megan Huang is illustrating.

Jen Onça is not excited to start her new, fast-paced fast-food career at Minilla Burger, but she'd much prefer a mundane day to the sudden return of Megalon! The monster brings destruction, trapping Jen in a forgotten lab deep beneath the restaurant with only the half-built form of Jet Jaguar to help her get out! She must repair the robotic defender to save herself and the city, but first she needs to escape the rubble trapping her in this tense adventure!

Yuzo the Biggest Battle in Tokyo, Yoshikazu Ishii's follow-up to Attack of the Giant Teacher, has also been picked up by SRS Cinema. No release details yet. I can't really speak to the film either, since it screened at the same time as Yumiko Shaku's panel at G-Fest, but as you can see from the poster, it's set during the pandemic.

The GAMERA -Rebirth- Gyaos has joined Godzilla Battle Line as an unusual sort of swarm unit. Your first summon of the match calls forth two sub-adults, and by the fifth summon you're sending out two sub-adults and three adults, still for four energy. They're probably the best swarm in the game, though still highly vulnerable to AOE units like Godzilla '01. I'm having fun with them in the Challenge Battles.

Notzilla, one of the sharpest kaiju comedies out there, is unexpectedly getting the graphic novel treatment. Mitch Teemley is adapting his own screenplay, with art by Zumart Putra. The comic is already finished, although I'm not clear on how folks who didn't back the Kickstarter (which wrapped on September 11) will get it. Useless trivia: the terrific cover above (one of four) is by Ben Dunn, who wrote the How to Draw Manga book I poured over in middle school.

After Troll shattered Netflix streaming records (according to Netflix), it's not super surprising that the company wants a sequel. Priority one: coming up with a title that's not Troll 2. Screenwriter Espen Aukan and director Roar Uthaug will both return.

Toy highlights of the past few weeks:

After confusing everyone by teasing its silhouette the day before April Fools', Tamashii has fully unveiled an S.H.Monsterarts Godzilla '72, a rare Showa figure from the line. It comes with two heads, one of them bloodied (see above). Due at the end of February.

After finally running out of ways to repaint their mold of Hedorah's Perfect Stage, Bandai is making a Movie Monster Series figure of the kaiju's Landing Stage. A Godzilla Store exclusive, it'll be released October 25.

After over two years, Funko is releasing a trio of Godzilla Singular Point Pops. Hopefully they go all-out with this show—it's not like there's any other plausible way for a Satomi Kanahara figure to exist.

[himitsusentaiblog]

HIDEAKI ANNO'S EARLIER LIVE-ACTION WORK

Anno is the current darling of the Tokusatsu world with his amazing Shin Japan Heroes Universe films and especially with the debut yesterday of the American premiere of Shin Kamen Rider. He is, of course, best known as an anime director and the creator of the seminal 90s series Neon Genesis Evangelion.

However, his first two forays into Live Action filmmaking were definitely different. Back in the late 90s, after 'finishing' Evangelion (Ha ha ha ha), Anno directed an anime romance series called Kareshi Kanojou no Jijyo (Kare Kano) which was a departure from his usual science fiction oriented shows. I was part of a fansub group at the time and was buying the laserdiscs for this series and I rather enjoyed it. The theme song is a total banger.

After finishing that project, Anno moved on to some live action films, his first being an experimental, shot entirely on digital, art film about the phenomenon of compensated dating called Love & Pop.

Compensated dating is/was the practice of older men paying high school girls to spend time with them and was basically a form of sex work that was questionable at best and downright illegal at worst. Anno was fascinated by a book about the subject called Topaz II by Ryū Murakami and adapted it to the screen with co-writer Akio Satsukawa.

In 2000, Anno made his second major Live Action film Shiki-Jitsu.

This was a highly personal film starring Ayako Fujitani and was about a disillusioned filmmaker who meets a young woman who continually repeats "tomorrow is my birthday". He tried to communicate with her through the movies he makes on a video camera. Anno met Fujitani (who is the daughter of colossal asshole actor Steven Seagal) while hanging out with Shinji Higuchi on the set of the the 90s Gamera films and thought she would be perfect for this role. After this, Anno directed the 2004 adaptation of Cutie Honey and the rest is history.

I thought it would be fun to take a peek at his lesser known films while he is in the eye of the tokusatsu public. Hope you learned something. These films are not super easy to find, unfortunately.

[grantgfan]

last of the bad monsters, the genie team faced in season 4

Galberos from ultraman nexus

King Silvagon from Great Decisive Battle! The Super 8 Ultra Brothers

King Goldras from Great Decisive Battle! The Super 8 Ultra Brothers

MechaGodzilla (Showa) from the godzilla series

King Joe from ultraseven

king joe black from Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle

gudon from the return of ultraman

twin tail from the return of ultraman

Giga Chimera from Great Decisive Battle! The Super 8 Ultra Brothers

zarab seijin from ultraman

Alien guts from ultraseven

orga from godzilla 2000

Bagan from a scrapped godzilla movie

Super Grand King from ultraman ginga

iris from gamera 3

hyper zetton from ultraman saga

U-Killersaurus from Ultraman Mebius & the Ultra Brothers

[playstationpark]

Wars In The Stars 'Gamera 2000' PlayStation

[greatrunner]

Netflix and Capcom teaming up to make a DMC3-era DMC anime

I'm tentatively intrigued, mostly because I'm like, "finally, some Dante content", but like, it's also Netflix, and that Gamera series ain't inspiring confidence in the least (not on a storytelling or animation level)

And, I know the Legend of Korra folk are working on this, but I've never been crazy about that their Castlevania series either. So, it's like, "I hope it doesn't suck"* but at the same time... it's from the Castlevania group, so it'll probably be the blandest thing this side of Legend of Korra.

*as someone who quite enjoyed the weirdly silted slice-of-life stories the mid-2000s anime cooked up as a reflection of either Dante or his values.

[badschmitt24071994]

Gamera 2000 1997

[miloscat]

[Review] Panzer Dragoon Saga (Sat)

Maybe they should have stuck to rail shooters...

My perfectly sensible journey through the Panzer Dragoon series: Mini, then Orta and the OG, then Gamera 2000, Remake, Zwei, and now finally this, the one that's not actually a rail shooter. Apparently development on Zwei and Saga both started at the same time but being an RPG spread over four Saturn discs, Saga took a few more years to cook. It's also one of the more pricey games in existence due to its release right when the Saturn was imploding and overall poor sales; its reputation as a rare and expensive title comes with a vaunted hidden gem status, but the reality... well...

Saga (or as it's known in Japan, Azel: Panzer Dragoon RPG) certainly is experimental. Like the monsters that populate the world's wastelands and forests, it's a mutant creation, a strange hybrid of Panzer Dragoon mechanics in an RPG framework. Or if not mechanics then surface trappings: four-quadrant perspectives in battle, aiming a lock-on cursor, three-dimensional dragon flight... but the gameplay experience is nothing at all like the arcadey rail-shooters that constitute the rest of the series. Saga is very much a departure, and I don't think that works in its favour.

The world of Panzer Dragoon was always so evocative, the unknowable but hostile technology of a lost era (with its cool techno-organic designs) littering a devastated landscape, folk struggling to eke out an existence while empires battle overhead. Digging into the setting seems like something the series was crying out for... yet somehow, by nailing things down in Saga you do end up losing some of the mystique. Sure I understood the lore more clearly from in-game texts and characters pontificating, but is that what the series really needed? Maybe they explain too much, and since this is a Japanese RPG you of course end up travelling through space and time to kill God. Ho hum.

Panzer Dragoon has always had cinematic moments, but again Saga goes to excess by having all dialogue be fully voiced, with mocapped cutscenes and long conversations. (The VA is all in Japanese as well, even in the international releases, with the series' trademark made-up language only used for the intro and outro cutscenes; another choice that removes a layer of mystery from this world.) It really slows the pace down, which is a theme for the on-foot sections, battle animations, and the speed of the overall plot.

After the inciting incident where Edge the bland protag-kun meets the dragon who befriends him for no reason, almost nothing happens to advance the plot for two whole discs. Although Edge is a defined character with a voice and backstory, he was designed to take a backseat to the eponymous Azel in story terms. Congratulations Team Andromeda, you created another boring RPG protagonist. Azel herself has potential to be interesting and has her moments but ends up underdeveloped, as often a plot device as a character, and literally not present for maybe half the game.

Although four discs sounds big, each one has just a handful of areas, and there's only two and a half towns in the game world. As an RPG and a story the scale is relatively small which works just fine for Panzer Dragoon, and the inhabited areas you do explore are dense and lively, with a day/night cycle and lots of interaction with the blocky Saturn people who live there. Controlling Edge in these areas is kind of clunky and slow, with the lock-on cursor being an odd way to interact and observe the world, but it results in lots of flavour text for background details even if a lot of it feels like filler.

When on the dragon, the world is understandably scaled back. An overworld map takes you between discrete zones, which are usually big open spaces broken up by tight corridors, or dungeons absolutely riddled with repetitive hallways and lifts. The dragon movement mechanics seem impressive but feel ultimately shallow and limiting, the technology and dev realities clearly not fulfilling the ambitions of open-roaming dragon-flying exploration. There's only a couple of occasions like the assault on a flying warship or the stealthy infiltration of an Imperial facility where these sections actually approach compelling gameplay; most of the time it's just busywork flying around and locking onto things to interact with them.

Finally, the battles. There are random and set encounters in the flying zones which take you to the battle screen, your dragon occupying one of four cardinal positions around the enemy. You or they can choose to move, which affects the ATB gauges that determine your actions but more importantly your relative positions put you in safe or danger zones from enemy attacks, and likewise enemy weak points are only revealed in certain spots. This positioning mechanic gives battles a unique feel, and turns most encounters into puzzle battles as you figure out how to respond to certain enemies. Your actions include the traditional PD single-target gun shot, a multi-target homing laser, and Zwei's Berserk technique is now the magic spell system. It's an amusing way to convert PD conventions into RPG ideas but it works well enough in theory. The problem is it felt to me that battles eventually became just slow and punishing until you learn the trick to them, at which point they're easy and time-wasting.

Saga is full of little secrets and such, the sort that compelled me to follow a guide so I didn't miss any obscure sidequest or missable treasures. One interaction requires you to talk to an NPC twenty-six times for crying out loud! Many of these rewards are relatively inconsequential but if you want your dragon to reach its final form there's a few hoops to jump through. By the end I found my inventory full of unused items and unspent money, so maybe I was too thorough. I also followed the guide's advice to seek out rare enemies to grind levels on, which may have reduced the difficulty but I'd rather that than the tedium of getting destroyed in late-game battles and having to replay sections. Saga is old-school in that way but it is from 1998 after all.

Panzer Dragoon Saga is such an unconventional RPG that I can't help but admire it, but at the same time it's clearly held back by the technology of the time and development pressures that result in it feeling messy and clumsy. There's no denying it has atmosphere and ideas and ambition, but it just didn't translate to the transcendent masterpiece that it's been built up as for me. Moreover, as a Panzer Dragoon game, it has almost nothing of what I really want out of a series that is otherwise stylish and inventive rail shooters. If telling a deeper story is what you want, then Orta was much more successful at it just by having a little more cutscene between levels! Even the rich world and visual design of the series is compromised rather than enhanced here as a result of the combination of gameplay styles/scales. I'm glad I played it but it's firmly the black sheep of the series as far as I'm concerned.

[timmurleyart]

Space Godzilla. 🪐🦖⚡️

[lowder-the-koopa]

Lowder Reviews: Long Running Animation